Looking Back at the Bomb

JAMES E. AUER and RICHARD HALLORAN

The great debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that swept across America last summer was partly emotional and
even trivial but mainly genuine and profound. The 50th anniversary
of the bombings generated at least nine books, a packet of magazine
articles, radio commentaries, television shows, reminiscences
by Americans who attacked and Japanese who were victims. If it
had not been for the O. J. Simpson trial, the atomic issue might
have dominated national attention.

The deliberations have subsided, but that does not mean the issues
have gone away or a consensus has been reached. The fundamental
question remains: Was the United States justified in dropping
two bombs that immediately killed 200,000 people, the vast majority
of them civilians? More simply, was President Truman right or
wrong?

After studying much of the literature, we have concluded that
the United States was justified and President Truman was right.
We also believe that, like most human endeavors, it could have
been handled better; the atomic bombing of Nagasaki so soon after
Hiroshima is rightly open to question. Lastly, we recognize that,
again as with most human endeavor, reasonable men and women will
differ.

Sifting through this mass of material, it seems evident that Japan
had been defeated by late July 1945, and that some Japanese leaders
realized this. But defeat and surrender are not the same, and
the issue was how to get Japan, notably the militarists who ruled
the nation, to quit. In this, President Truman appeared to have
six options:

Invade Japan in two stages, prolonging the war for a year
and taking large numbers of American and Allied casualties.

Continue the aerial bombing and naval blockade until the Japanese
lost the will to resist and surrendered.

Get the Russians into the war in the hope they would crack
Japanese resolve and make them sue for peace.

Accept Japan's proposals to negotiate by modifying the demand
for an unconditional surrender to permit Japan to retain the Emperor,
a vital point to the Japanese, and agreeing to a minimal occupation
of Japan.

Warn that atomic bombs would be used unless Japan surrendered,
and possibly detonate one as a demonstration.

Drop the atomic bombs to shock the Japanese into quitting
before more devastation was loosed on their nation.

Each option was considered, some more thoroughly than others,
between 12 April when Mr. Truman became President and 24 July
when he approved an order to drop the bombs after 3 August 1945.
It was not a methodical process--government then was no more neat
and orderly than it is today--but the decision was taken after
three and a half years of a brutal, draining, desperate war.

US forces planned to invade Kyushu, Japan's southwestern island,
on 1 November 1945; a second assault was planned for 1 March 1946,
against Tokyo. As for expected casualties, planners knew the ratio
had risen as American forces got closer to Japan and the Japanese
became ever more ferocious in defending their homeland. Estimates
were all over the lot, from a minimum of 40,000 on up.

Continuing to bomb and blockade aroused fears that Japan would
wait out the United States in hopes of a better deal. Americans
were weary and impatient to end the war. Keeping an invasion force
poised for months would be hard. Allied prisoners all over Asia
might be killed.

The Russians promised to enter the war in August, but there is
little evidence that Japan would have quit even if the Russians
had reached the southern tip of Korea. The high command in Tokyo
was not relying on forces on the Asian mainland to defend Japan
proper.

Negotiating on Japanese terms was seen as breaking faith with
Allies and a political land mine within the United States, where
the public backed unconditional surrender. The Allies relented
on retaining the Emperor; a shift in the Potsdam Declaration called
for the unconditional surrender of Japan's armed forces rather
than Japan as a nation, a nuance that Japanese diplomats caught
but militarists ignored.

Much thought was given to warning the Japanese about the atomic
bomb beyond the Potsdam Declaration's promise that Japan faced
"prompt and utter destruction," but some doubted the
Japanese high command would believe it. A proposed demonstration
was dismissed because the Japanese might shoot down the airplane
carrying the bomb, because the bomb had been tested but once and
might not work again, and because the Japanese might think the
United States had only one.

That left dropping the bomb. On 24 July in Potsdam, Mr. Truman
approved its use. The next night, he wrote in his diary: "We
have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.
. . . It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered,
but it can be made useful."

Critics of Mr. Truman contend he dropped the bomb to stave off
the Russians, or to justify the $2 billion expense of developing
the bomb, or because he was a racist. The overwhelming evidence
in several of the new books, plus that from historian David McCullough
in his superb biography, Truman, shows that the President
was driven foremost by a determination to end the war on American
terms and with the least loss of life. "We have used it in
order to shorten the agony of war," Mr. Truman said just
after the bomb had been dropped.

With the benefit of hindsight, some of the criticism might have
been forestalled if the Potsdam Declaration had included an explicit
pledge that the imperial throne would be retained plus an explicit
warning about the atomic bomb. No one knows, however, whether
that would have been enough to make Japan surrender. No Japanese
has come forward to say: "If only . . . ."

Each student of this decision may draw his or her own insights
from the history of this episode. Among them might be to reinforce
the conviction that moral issues do not go away, as much as a
soldier might be tempted to brush them aside to get on with the
mission. Another might be an understanding that the only fair
way to judge a momentous decision would be in the context of the
times. As Senator Howard Baker said during the Watergate hearings:
"What did the President know and when did he know it?"

Still another: Personalities count, whether they be elected or
appointed political leaders or serving military officers. Secretary
of War Henry L. Stimson comes off as thoughtful and perceptive,
while Secretary of State James Byrnes seems to have been unable
to see past the next political maneuver. Even so, in this decision,
civilian supremacy over the military services served the nation
well. Students of this question might find enlightening a comparison
between the dominating political role of the Japanese high command
and the subordinate military role of the American Joint Chiefs
in World War II.

Lastly, we come away from these books again discouraged by the
corrosive effect of interservice rivalry. Some was natural and
even constructive: Each service thought it had the better way
to force Japan to surrender--the Army Air Force by bombing, the
Navy by blockade, the Army by invasion. From that came consideration
of all possibilities. But sometimes a reader might wonder whether
General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz were more
concerned with fighting each other than the Japanese.

A leader of the so-called revisionists who condemn President Truman's
decision is Gar Alperovitz, a historian and political economist
at the University of Maryland. His new book, The Decision to
Use the Atomic Bomb, is an updated version of his 1965 Atomic
Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. Armed with scores of declassified
records, including Mr. Truman's notes on Potsdam that were discovered
in 1979, Alperovitz has written a long and thoroughly documented
work.

He contends that Japan knew it was defeated by May 1945. In his
view, if the United States had indicated more clearly that Japan
could retain Emperor Hirohito, Japan would have surrendered without
an American invasion or the atomic bombings. Any hesitation by
Japan would have been overcome by Russia's attack, but the United
States delayed the Potsdam Conference so that the Alamogordo atomic
test results would be known. Then, Secretary of State Byrnes persuaded
President Truman to discourage Soviet entry into the war. Alperovitz
further contends that most US officials, military and civilian,
other than Byrnes, who won over a wavering President Truman, and
the Manhattan Project chief, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves,
wanted the Potsdam Declaration to assure the Japanese that they
could retain the Emperor. Despite his almost endless documentation,
Alperovitz admits that critical decisions at Potsdam were not
documented, including the decision on 24 July to allow the Army
Air Force to use atomic bombs on cities as soon as made ready.
Alperovitz says Byrnes wanted to use the bombs not to induce Japan's
surrender but to make the Soviets behave. Thus, two bombs were
needlessly dropped on two cities that weren't military targets.

Then Alperovitz contends that Truman and Byrnes proceeded to cover
up the deed. While Alperovitz anoints Byrnes as his major villain,
he's back and forth on Secretary of War Stimson. He alternately
paints him as the "good" advocate of offering assurances
on the Emperor, the "bad" Cabinet secretary responsible
for building the bomb, the "good" savior of the ancient
capital in Kyoto, and the "bad" postwar apologist for
the bomb. Most poignantly, Alperovitz uses Stimson as the "good"
voice of reason arguing unsuccessfully that "where wisdom
lay" was in seeing "satisfactory relations with Russia
as not merely connected with but as virtually dominated by the
problem of the atomic bomb." Alperovitz is hard on Truman
for not listening to his Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy,
who warned that atomic bombs would be in the same category as
poison gas, a violation of "all of the known acts of war."
The author condemns the President for having acted illegally,
self-servingly overestimating the number of American lives saved,
and misrepresenting Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets.

Race is the focus of historian and multiculturalist Ronald Takaki,
a Japanese American at the University of California, Berkeley,
in his mercifully briefer Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the
Atomic Bomb. Mr. Truman's racial bias, his lack of international
experience, and his inferiority complex dominate Takaki's account.
Takaki also takes umbrage over Truman's estimate of half-a-million
lives saved by the bombs and emphasizes the lesser casualty estimates
of some military leaders.

Takaki makes sure his readers know Mr. Truman used the "n-word"
frequently, including in letters to his wife, Bess. In one, Mr.
Truman writes, his Uncle Will "says the Lord made a white
man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and
it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do
I." Takaki tells us there was lots of racism then in the
United States, in case we didn't know, and Harry Truman, despite
some actions to the contrary, such as in integrating the military
services after the war, was an example of that racism.

Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology at John Jay College
and the City University of New York, and Greg Mitchell, a former
editor of Nuclear Times magazine, consider the term "revisionist"
to be pejorative. Even so, they are far more vituperative than
Alperovitz and Takaki in condemning Mr. Truman and his associates
in their Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. They
allege not only a cover-up by Truman, but a "confabulation,"
which they define as "an untrue belief or reconstruction
that can unconsciously alter events in favor of one's own moral
claim." The authors assert: "It can change what one
actually did into something one's conscience can accept--and this
confabulation had the specific psychological function of placing
blame for the bombings entirely on the Japanese."

In the final quarter of this volume, the authors describe the
"largely unexamined dimension of Hiroshima: the lasting psychological,
ethical, and political impact on those who used the first nuclear
weapons." They say "the bomb's contamination not only
of Japanese victims and survivors, but of the American mind as
well" has produced "aberrations in American life."

Among these aberrations, they list nuclear weapons "as the
dominant technology of a permanent, self-propelling American megamachine
that seems almost independent of human control." The nuclear
dynamic "inevitably extends to non-nuclear devices"
being seen as "humane," which "undoubtedly influenced
the widespread use of highly advanced and lethal napalm in Vietnam
and carpet bombing in Iraq." The atomic bomb's "desecration
and transgression is further illuminated by the Frankenstein myth"
as the monster and his creator are "antithetical halves of
a single being."

Lifton and Mitchell assert that America's "bomb entrapment
required us to violate existing ethical practices in actions aimed
at harming our people and consistently lying to them about that
harm." It was a "self-betrayal" of "our own
history, our national entity, and ourselves." Hiroshima is
the "mother of all cover-ups, creating tonalities, distortions,
manipulative procedures, and patterns of concealment that have
been applied to all of American life that followed" in Vietnam,
Watergate, and Iran-Contra.

They assert the decision to bomb Hiroshima ultimately caused the
genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. There is more, but you get the
drift.

The analyses by Alperovitz, Takaki, and, most of all, Lifton and
Mitchell, confuse power and morality. War, as Clausewitz reminds
us, is a continuation of politics by other means, and those means
can get very nasty. Alperovitz, Takaki, Lifton, and Mitchell say
little about the strategic concerns of American leaders during
and after World War II. Alperovitz mentions but provides little
analysis of Roosevelt's decision to defer the serious problem
of dealing with the Soviet Union. Truman had to confront that
problem immediately and saw the potential of the bomb to end the
war plus deal with Soviet aggressiveness. Alperovitz and the others
blame Truman and Byrnes for causing the Cold War; Lifton and Mitchell
blame them for a myriad of additional ills. But none of these
authors offers convincing evidence to suggest that their alternative
strategies would have produced a better world.

More important, Alperovitz, Takaki, and Lifton and Mitchell fail
to note that the atomic decision was made cleanly and properly
by the civilian Commander in Chief of the armed forces in accordance
with the Constitution. No Dr. Strangelove appeared. Alperovitz
suggests that the inexperienced or naive Truman might have been
duped by Byrnes but does not assert that the President denied
his responsibility for the decision even when the suffering from
the blasts and radiation became obvious. In short, the authors
ignored the process of civilian control that worked.

All three books also make much of reservations by military and
civilian leaders before the bombs were dropped. None of the authors,
however, notes that no one even threatened to resign, much less
did so to indicate moral outrage. If military officers are bound
to disobey illegal or immoral orders, then George Marshall, William
Leahy, Ernest King, and Douglas MacArthur, to name only some of
those alleged to have opposed dropping the bomb, did not do their
duty. Another conclusion is that their views have been taken out
of context.

Nor do the revisionists suggest that any other country possessing
the bomb would not have used it. They might expect the United
States to hold itself to a higher standard, but by 1945 the rigors
of war weighed heavily on all combatants. And in a democracy the
highest imperative, after victory itself, was to stop the killing
of American men (and foreign men, women, and children, too). Woodrow
Wilson ended American neutrality and entered World War I, even
though he had promised not to during his election campaign, because
of his outrage at Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Following Pearl Harbor, the United States used nearly unrestricted
submarine warfare as an effective means of defeating Japan. The
fire-bombing of Tokyo provided further evidence of American willingness
to use horrific means to force Japan to surrender. Had the atomic
bomb not been used, there would have been political bloodshed
when the American public found out about it, especially because
it "wasn't used to save American lives." Minoru
Genda, the Japanese naval officer who planned the attack on Pearl
Harbor, was asked during a visit to Annapolis, Maryland, in the
1970s whether Japan would have used the A-bomb. Despite his position
as a member of the Diet, Japan's national legislature, he answered
candidly that he thought so--and set off a political uproar in
Japan. Revisionists do not permit themselves to see that the American
decision reflected the bomb's capability to make a difference
in a long and ugly war, not America's immorality.

At the other end of the spectrum, Robert James Maddox, a historian
at Penn State University, wastes no time in disclosing where he
stands. On page 2 of Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision
Fifty Years Later, he laces into Gar Alperovitz by name, rank,
and serial number. Referring to Alperovitz's earlier book, Atomic
Diplomacy, Maddox asserts: "Despite the appearance of
meticulous documentation, it was based on pervasive misrepresentations
of the historical record." He accuses the revisionists of
"writing history backward" in using casualty projections
for an invasion of Japan. He says they are either "incompetent
to write about" the figures or they employ them "to
promote their own agendas."

Maddox has written a lean, well-focused, and tightly argued volume
seen largely from the standpoint of American leaders who influenced
the President's decision. The book is carefully documented and
has a useful bibliography. A thoughtful chapter examines the legacy
of unconditional surrender and how it complicated getting a defeated
Japan to quit. President Truman, Maddox says, inherited from President
Roosevelt "a mixed bag of advisers, whose competing claims
inhibited development of consistent, well-thought out policies."

A chapter on "Advice and Dissent" gives a good account
of a crucial meeting on 18 June 1945, when the President met with
Cabinet officers and the Joint Chiefs. Until then, each service
had fought for its own mission. The Chiefs, led by General George
C. Marshall, the Army's Chief of Staff, agreed that an invasion,
at least of Kyushu, Japan's southwestern island, was essential.
The President wanted to know what casualties could be expected.
The Chiefs gave varying estimates, which apparently began the
controversy that runs to this day. The fact of the matter, as
General Marshall pointed out, was that no one could say with any
accuracy. He concluded only: "It is a grim fact that there
is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war."

Later, at Potsdam, the Chiefs discussed the atomic bomb. Here,
Maddox contradicts the revisionists: "Pending the discovery
of new material, there is no reliable evidence that any
[emphasis in original] high-ranking officer expressed moral objections
about the bomb to Truman." Maddox has a less-than-kind word
for unnamed military officers: "Later claims by various generals
and admirals about what they thought are immaterial and in many
cases obviously self-serving or motivated by devotion to their
particular branch of service."

Maddox's clinching argument:

Truman was commander in chief of American armed forces and had
a duty to the men under his command not shared by those who were
to propose alternatives while bearing no responsibility for the
consequences. Or by those passing moral judgment years later.
One can only imagine what would have happened had tens of thousands
of young Americans been killed or wounded on Japanese soil, and
then it became known that the president had chosen not to employ
weapons that might have ended the war months earlier.

Another lean book is Alan J. Levine's The Pacific War: Japan
versus the Allies. Rather than put the revisionists in the
cross-hairs, Levine goes after a wider range of writers. He contends
that Ronald Spector's Eagle Against the Sun is flawed by
its lack of interest in Japan's side of things. He asserts that
John Toland's The Rising Sun "perhaps exemplifies
the tendency to whitewash the Japanese." On the other hand,
David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy mistakenly
"portrays all of modern Japanese history as a sinister conspiracy
orchestrated by the throne."

Levine, a historian specializing in Russian history, is no apologist
for the United States or President Truman or American military
commanders. He argues that Japan could have been forced to surrender
with air and sea power: "The Americans would only have had
to wait to starve and burn Japan into submission." Thus,
he writes: "The belief in the need to invade Japan was an
error pregnant with consequences." Again: "The foolishness
of American strategic thinking is shown by the fact that many
leaders of the Japanese Army wanted [emphasis in original]
an invasion." As other writers report, the Japanese meant
to exact such heavy losses on the invading armada and on the beach
that the Americans would negotiate a peace less onerous to Japan.

Levine views the Hiroshima atomic bomb in the context of bombing
Japan into surrender and therefore supports Truman's decision:
"The morality of the decision to use the bomb cannot be sensibly
considered in isolation, although this has often been tried. The
United States made the decision to accept massive losses of civilian
life when it began the fire attacks on Japanese cities, not when
President Truman decided to use the atomic bomb."

Had the A-bomb never existed, Levine argues, Japan would still
have quit before the planned invasion. But conventional bombing
and blockade would probably have killed more Japanese than those
lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "It is thus reasonably certain,"
Levine concludes, "that the use of the bomb saved Japanese
as well as American lives." He also argues: "In hindsight,
the dropping of the second bomb, so soon after the first, must
be considered a horrible mistake. Nagasaki's destruction seems
to have contributed nothing to the decision to surrender."
Other writers would point to continued Japanese resistance up
to and beyond the Emperor's proclamation on 15 August that Japan
must make peace by "enduring the unendurable and suffering
the insufferable."

Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar wait until the end of Code-Name
Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan--and Why Truman Dropped
the Bomb to go after unnamed revisionists: "Anyone who
closely and dispassionately examines the last weeks of the war
would have to conclude that Truman was looking for ways to end
the conflict honorably and at the lowest possible cost in American
and Japanese [emphasis in original] lives."

Allen, who has written about the Civil War, and Polmar, a writer
on military affairs and consultant to the Pentagon, bring up a
point not found elsewhere in the debate over casualty projections.
The Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot "ordered more than 370,000
Purple Hearts for award to the wounded and the families of those
killed in the final battles for Japan." Thus, they contend,
"Kyushu would have been the bloodiest invasion in history."

This is an uneven book with, nonetheless, some keen insights.
The opening chapter says officers at the Naval War College in
Newport, R.I., had begun working on plans for a campaign against
Japan in 1897. The first American thought that this might require
an invasion came in 1900. Another chapter dissects Truman's decision
to drop the atomic bomb--and how he confronted it in Trumanesque
the-buck-stops-here fashion. Allen and Polmar give a good account
of the meeting on 18 June 1945, when the President, his top advisers,
and the Joint Chiefs discussed the options for forcing Japan to
surrender. The authors give another good account of discussions
at Potsdam, where Stimson and Byrnes disagreed, as they had in
Washington, over unconditional surrender.

The book, however, is marred by an evident lack of familiarity
with Japan. The Kuriles stretch toward Japan from the Kamchatka
Peninsula, not from Siberia. The Japanese word "haragei"
does not mean "the Japanese art of saying one thing while
meaning another"; rather it means "gut feeling"
and refers to unspoken, intuitive communication. The term "ketsu-go,"
said to mean "decisive battle," apparently comes from
reports by General Douglas MacArthur's staff but is not found
in Japanese records or a dictionary today. The proper term was
"hondo kessen," announced by the Imperial General Staff
in June 1945.

Stanley Weintraub's massive volume entitled The Last Great
Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945 is disappointing.
It seeks to weave together so many strands, from Japanese soldiers
retreating through the jungles of Burma to American sailors abandoned
after the cruiser Indianapolis is torpedoed, that all but
the most dogged reader gets lost.

Once Weintraub, who teaches arts and humanities at Penn State,
brings his narrative to Potsdam, he slips into a day-by-day account
that, despite its meandering, provides certain insights. For one
thing, arguments over the fate of Poland and war reparations from
Germany, which had quit in May, seemed to have taken more time
than discussions over how to make Japan surrender. For another,
he clears up a small mystery, which is why President Truman ordered
the atomic bomb not to be used until 3 August. Apparently Truman
wanted to be out of Potsdam and away from Marshal Josef Stalin
when it was dropped.

This book, too, is marred by factual errors. The author mistakes
the Kuriles for the Ryukyu chain of islands; Hiroshima is not
"close to the southern tip of Honshu" but 100 miles
away; Thailand was not occupied by Japan but was an ally. The
author's distaste for the military service comes through in repeated
references to the "brass" and in technical mistakes:
He writes of "loading" a bomb after takeoff, when he
meant "arming," and the command "bombs away"
to order bomb bay doors opened rather than a bombardier's signal
that bombs have been dropped.

Bruce Lee's Marching Orders: The Untold Story of World War
II is the result of a journalist going through what he says
were 14,000 pages of "Magic" summaries, the product
of American intelligence breaking Japanese diplomatic codes. The
book provides only skimpy context and is thus useful primarily
to those who bring to it a strong grasp of World War II history.

Rain of Ruin: A Photographic History of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
is aptly described in its title. The large-sized book traces the
atomic bomb from research and development through deployment to
the B-29 base on Tinian to the drops over the two Japanese cities
and the consequences of those detonations.

While not among the recent books, students of this issue might
find keen insights in Chapter One of Forrest C. Pogue's book George
C. Marshall: Statesman 1945-1959. He quotes General Marshall
as saying, "I think it was quite necessary to drop the bomb
to shorten the war."

Curiously, none of these books reports much about the engineering
and logistics feat that enabled B-29s to bomb Japan with conventional
and atomic weapons. The scruffy island of Tinian was captured
on 10 August 1944. Less than four months later, an airfield was
ready for the first B-29 strike on 24 November. By August 1945,
a year after construction started, that airbase was the largest
in the world at the time and accommodated nearly 1000 B-29s. A
visitor to the nearly abandoned island 30 years later found the
airfields, with a touch of maintenance, could be usable again.[1]

Among the magazine articles, a standout is Donald Kagan's "Why
America Dropped the Bomb" in the September 1995 issue of
Commentary. Kagan, a historian at Yale, is masterful in
refuting the "new revisionist consensus" that the bomb
was neither necessary nor a morally acceptable means to end the
war, and that Americans have refused to admit this. Kagan contends,
"If a moral complaint is to be fairly lodged, it must be
lodged against any and all warfare that attacked innocents."
He asserts: "It is right to do all we can to reduce the horrors
of war. But to prevent them entirely, it will be necessary to
prevent war." He concludes that Americans need not shrink
from basic questions arising from Hiroshima: "An honest examination
of the evidence reveals that their leaders, in the tragic predicament
common to all who have engaged in wars that reach the point where
every choice is repugnant, chose the least bad course. Americans
may look back on that decision with sadness, but without shame."

An article in the Spring 1995 issue of the Wilson Quarterly
is pertinent even if not directly a part of the A-bomb debate.
Mitchel Reiss, a White House aide in 1988-89, reviews the 50 years
since Hiroshima in "The Future That Never Came" and
says "never before in military history have countries exercised
such restraint with the destructive power at their disposal."
Lest anyone become complacent, he cautions: "The danger is
that as the echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grow more distant
with the passing of time, the devastation and unspeakable horror
of those events may fade from our collective memories. We forget
at our peril."

NOTE

1. The Tinian airbase was built by the Sixth Brigade of Naval
Construction Battalions commanded by Commodore Paul James Halloran,
Civil Engineer Corps, USN, who was Richard Halloran's father.
Readers, please excuse this nod to filial piety.

Toland, John. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Far of the Japanese
Empire 1936-1945. New York: Random House, 1970.

Weintraub, Stanley. The Last Great Victory: The End of World
War II, July/August 1945. New York: Dutton, 1995.

The Reviewers: Dr. James E. Auer is Director of the Center
for United States-Japan Studies and Cooperation at Vanderbilt
University, Nashville. A retired naval officer, he was the Japan
desk officer in the Defense Department for over nine years. Richard
Halloran, formerly with The New York Times as a foreign
correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington,
writes on security issues from his base in Honolulu. A paratrooper
during his Army service, he is a frequent contributor to Parameters.

The Middle East: Contradictory and
Less Predictable

NORVELL B. DEATKINE

Each summer for the past few years I have been able to spend several
weeks in the Middle East, in 11 countries including Algeria, Morocco,
Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and this year in Oman. When I return
and begin preparing for my next class and catching up on my reading,
as well as attending various gatherings of the Middle East scholarly
illuminati, I have a problem in relating what I hear and read
to what I have seen. The problem is that of transforming the increasing
mass of information into readable analyses of what it all means,
to identify what Arnold Toynbee has called "the slower, impalpable,
imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate
to the depths."

Midst the recent avalanche of books, symposium papers, and articles
on Middle Eastern subjects, a truly analytical vision of recent
and current events in the Middle East is rare, particularly one
that can describe current events from a historical perspective.
There are few Hodgsons, Hittis, Houranis, Brockelmanns, Coons,
Von Grunebaums, Kedouris, Alfred Guillaumes, H. A. R. Gibbs, and
others of similar stature writing today. Those who attempt it,
such as Bernard Lewis, an Orientalist of the old school, are systematically
deconstructed in print by the current crop of predominantly chronocentric
and egocentric academicians. Toynbee predicted in 1948 that "Pan-Islamism
is dormant--yet we have to reckon with the possibility that the
sleeper may awake if ever the cosmopolitan proletariat of a Westernized
world revolts against Western domination and cries out for anti-Western
leadership." There is today a particularly urgent need for
this type of historical perspective when analyzing Islamism and
its consequences.

This need is made more pressing by the many contradictions in
trends that this reviewer has observed in the past six years.
Begin with the opposing trends of modernity and atavism. On one
hand the radical Islamists are projecting an image of an Islamic
state operating within the strictures of a 7th-century Islamic
culture and theology, while on the other hand the same radicals,
who are frequently highly educated young men, pursue state-of-the-art
technological advances in all areas of human endeavor. This is
one of the points made by Daniel Pipes in an illuminating article
on radical Islam in the December issue of First Things.
Radical Islam is not some quaint Eastern religion suitable for
new-age dabblers. Second, despite increasing calls for a united
Islamic world, the reality seems to be a continuing fragmentation
of the Arab and Islamic world. Third, while there seems to be
some stirring of political freedom in parts of the Middle East,
generally there is less social freedom than 25 years ago: consider
the more traditional roles and dress that women have adopted,
willingly or otherwise, during that period. Fourth, satellite
dishes have sprouted like mushrooms all over the Middle East,
even in Iran, where they are banned (recently a satellite dish
factory in Iran was raided to stop production). Yet, Western mythmakers
notwithstanding, the "global village" effect has not
occurred in the region; if anything, the trend seems to be away
from the Western world and its political culture, as well as its
social mores. As a political-military operator in the field or
a planner at national level, how does one make sense of these
apparent contradictions?

One can begin to look for answers by analyzing a similar era--the
Tanzimat, the Ottoman Empire's experiment with Westernization.
That attempt to modernize the Ottoman Empire while retaining its
traditional society and political culture provides an early example
of the impossibility of changing one component of a culture, whether
economics, politics, or technology, without altering the culture
itself. Yet this is precisely what the neo-Islamists want to do.
As a Muslim colleague put it, "We want your TV sets but not
your programs, we want your technology but not your culture."
Essentially they want modernity but not modernism. Does this disdainful
rejection of Western culture presage a return to the "self-sufficiency"
of the middle ages, in which an Islamic world slumbered in the
belief that the Western world was inferior and did not constitute
a threat to their comfortable existence? Or it this a harbinger
of an aggressive, new ideology masquerading as a religion, with
the predictable result of collectivist totalitarianism similar
to fascism or communism? Or is it the legitimate, predictable,
and inevitable response to generations of Western domination,
cultural penetration, and perceived Western superiority in almost
every aspect of human advances? Or is this simply the perception
created by overheated academic discourse? Is there an "Islamic
threat"?

The academic contest concerning the Islamic "threat"
is a relatively new game, but it is being fought with the same
teams on the field: those sympathetic to the Arab or Palestinian
cause on one side and those sympathetic to the Zionist idea on
the other. There are, however, some notable exceptions on this
question among Arab secularists.

The academic battle lines were drawn in sharp relief by Bernard
Lewis in a 1990 article, "Muslim Rage," in which he
explained that the palpable anti-Western emotions of the governments
and populace were not simply a consequence of Western support
(meaning American) of Israel, as so many writers on the Middle
East would have us believe, but something much deeper--a clash
of civilizations. This theme was enlarged upon by Samuel Huntington
in his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" in the
Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. Most Middle East
scholars have attacked or distanced themselves from that perspective;
even those with reservations about aspects of radical Islamism
are loathe to say so unless they transform the evidence into conflicts
based on gender, race, or class. For example, the most recent
Middle East Journal had an entire edition on feminist issues
in the Middle East, complete with passages such as this one: "These
masculine-centric discursive axioms constituted European nationalism
from its inception. Both Benedict Anderson and George Mosse argue
that nationalism favors a distinctly homosocial form of male bonding."
I wonder what Freya Stark, Elizabeth Monroe, and Gertrude Bell
would have thought of the preceding lines? Talcott Seelye, a long-serving
US Foreign Service Officer in the Middle East, was once quoted
as saying he never read any of the newer works on the Middle East.
One can readily understand why.

Some coherent and useful literature is still being published,
however. An example is A Sense Of Siege: The Geopolitics of
Islam and the West, which presents a balanced analysis and
is written in understandable English. Graham Fuller and Ian Lesser
have produced an excellent review and assessment of the current
literature on the subject of Islamism and the interaction of the
Western and Islamic worlds. The authors are careful, however,
to disassociate themselves from the "Islam versus the West"
paradigm, declaring their "deep commitment to the concept
of reconciliation and cooperation between civilizations."
One hopes this idealism did not skew their analysis. Moreover
their affinity for splitting the difference ("no one side
is more right than the other") in placing blame for civilizational
conflict is not necessarily the right approach in a "let
the chips fall where they may" examination of the issues.
These reservations aside, this is a succinct and highly readable
work for political-military planners and operators. The authors
recognize that there is little we can do to prevent Islamic takeovers
of states that are failing in their obligations to the populace;
nevertheless, they believe that US dialogue with "moderate"
Islamic groups is "worth pursuing." The September 1995
Middle East Quarterly features two interviews of note.
One is with Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau, who
provides a reasonable rationale for a dialogue with Islamic fundamentalists.
The other is with an Iranian dissident, Mohammad Mohaddessin,
who opines that "there is no such thing as a moderate fundamentalist.
It's like talking about a moderate Nazi."

In an academic field where personal attacks and charges of racism
abound, producing an objective book on the subject of Islam and
the West is akin to walking across a minefield. The current literature
on the subject produces more heat than light--more visceral emotion
than dispassionate analysis. One writer sees the Huntington article
as being the root of the "racist" attitudes of Western
leaders--as if Islam constitutes a race. The writer, Haifaa A.
Jawad, in the periodical Defence and International Security
decries the policy of some Western states to solicit friendly
Muslim nations to contain Muslim fundamentalism. This writer has
it backwards: the leaders of several Muslim nations are concerned
about what they see as a too-benevolent view of Islamism among
those Western nations. The double standard is also at work here.
While the author condemns the denial of Western citizenship to
Muslim immigrants, she fails to mention hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians, into their third generation, living in Arab countries
that adamantly refuse to grant them the most basic of human rights.
("They will forget their homeland." "It will legitimize
Israeli occupation." etc.) Then there is her complaint that
Muslims living in the West are not treated with respect. There
is no mention of the thinly veiled intolerance to non-Muslim communities
in the Middle East which is emptying these states of their Christian
and other minority populations.

Tolerance and respect cannot be a unilateral exercise. This idea
is illustrated by the proceedings of various Christian-Muslim
dialogue groups, one of which was recently reported in the periodical
First Things. The Westerners, generally clergymen of "progressive"
mainline churches, denounced the Crusades, the reconquest of Spain,
Western imperialism, the establishment of artificial borders,
the wars in the Russian Muslim states, and Bosnia, the latter
two ostensibly the latest version of the Crusades. The Muslims
reiterated these denunciations, adding the state of Israel as
an example of a new Crusader state, "a foreign body lodged
in the heart of the Arab world." Never will one hear any
reference to how the Muslims came to occupy Spain, or the Balkans,
or North Africa, or indeed most of the land they occupy today.
Author C. M. Naim, a professor of Urdu at the University of Chicago,
made this memorable observation: "Interfaith dialogue soon
turns into an incoherent comparison of Islam, a faith without
history, and Christianity, a history without faith." Certain
American Middle East gurus tend to convulse at the mere mention
of the home-grown "religious right" while maintaining
a curious accommodation to Islamic fundamentalism. As Naim wrote,
"One only heard that secularism is good for America but not
for Pakistan or Egypt, because . . . Muslims are required by their
religion to establish an Islamic state."

This imbalance in dialogue allows for views that are otherwise
not tolerated in our secular society. For instance, a book written
for American Muslim high school students, The Messenger of
Allah, was available at a book fair sponsored by the Middle
East Studies Association. In describing the situation at the time
of the Prophet Mohammed's wars against non-Muslim tribes in the
Arabian peninsula, the book describes Jews as hypocrites, back-stabbers,
usurers, deceitful. Christians come off somewhat better, being
alluded to merely as cowards. Among the apologists for Islam it
is this condescending license granted to Islamic excesses but
denied others which renders their indulgent assessments suspect.
The lack of rigor in studies of the effects of Islam on society
and everyday life by some Western scholars results in a myopic
view that could prove dangerously wrong.

Politically driven assessments in the other direction are also
plentiful. A PBS Frontline program, "Jihad in America,"
was mostly an exercise in fear-mongering; the overblown rhetoric
of the featured speakers spewing hate and vengeance was not evaluated
in the context of their culture or compared to other domestic
movements spouting similar appeals to visceral emotions. For instance,
the tone of the Muslim rabble-rousers in the film was approximately
the same as some of the speakers at the recent "Million Man
March" in Washington, D.C. Nor in retrospect is the radical
Muslim rhetoric more dangerous than was that of the New Left on
college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. One advocated class warfare,
one promotes religious confrontation, and one racial strife. The
result is the same. In a truly classic book, The Arab Mind,
Raphael Patai capturestheMiddle Eastern propensity
for exaggeration, and for context over content. Too bad the Arab
elite hate the book. They could learn much from it. Patai would
have made an interesting defense witness at the World Trade Center
bombing conspiracy trial, in which the verbal bombast of the ten
defendants proved to be a crucial element in the convictions.

Turning to the more topical issue of the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction in the Middle East, The UN Inspections
in Iraq: Lessons forOn-Site Verification, by Kathleen
Bailey, has some interesting conclusions pertaining to the planning
and conduct of arms control verification inspections. The author
introduces her book by stating,

The successes of the UN activities in Iraq have encouraged arms
control planners to press for more intrusive inspections in several
areas--from new inspection measures for the global 1972 Biological
and Toxin Convention to regional agreements such as the African
Nuclear Weapons-free Zone.

A close study of the book--a very readable and interesting experience
despite its daunting title--leaves one doubtful that measures
to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction are effective.
In the chapter on chemical weapons, the author believes the Iraqis
may have removed and hidden an entire Sarin chemical production
plant. In the next chapter, Dr. Bailey concludes that biological
agents are easily hidden and that only effective human intelligence
will uncover them. She notes also that the lack of Western human
intelligence sources was a primary weakness in the search for
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

In her final chapter, on nuclear weapons, the author substantiates
what UNSCOM inspectors have indicated, that the Iraqis had the
indigenous capability to produce weapons well beyond that envisaged
by Western intelligence services, reflecting a persistent incredulity
in the West that underdeveloped nations have the ability to produce
sophisticated weapons without our help. David Kay, the former
chief inspector of the nuclear inspection team to Iraq, makes
this point crystal clear in a Winter 1995 article in the Washington
Quarterly. In the space of one decade, Iraq went from total
dependence on the outside world to near total indigenous capability.
Dr. Bailey, in turn, avers that without human intelligence, the
detection of home-grown nuclear production is near impossible,
noting that even after ten ballistic missile inspections, the
Iraqis are considered to have 200 to 300 Scud-type missiles hidden.
She summarizes by concluding that export controls inhibited but
did not prevent continuing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass
destruction.

It is within the above context that two articles in the Autumn
1995 issue of the Washington Quarterly are of interest.
One by Aaron Karp is relentlessly Pollyannish, but the other,
by Ahmed Hashim, is more clear-eyed and guarded in outlook. Both
agree that conventional arms acquisition and force structures
of Middle Eastern nations have peaked and are now actually declining.
Both agree that the Arab quest for conventional arms parity with
the Israelis has abated; Karp, however, sees little interest on
the part of the Arabs to create a strategic deterrence based on
weapons of mass destruction, while Hashim posits that is exactly
what is happening. Karp has evidence that:

Egypt long ago lost interest in acquiring a nuclear option. Syria
never assembled the technical resources. Others like Saudi Arabia
toyed with the possibility but were never seriously interested.
The few that remained interested, like Iran and Libya, have had
little luck, although foreign technical assistance or illegally
acquired fissionable materials could change that.

In light of the sobering lessons contained in the Bailey book,
assessments such as these are not only condescending but downright
dangerous. Not only does Ahmed Hashim make a good case for the
view that Middle Eastern leaders will opt for weapons of mass
destruction as a solution to their security problems, but he also
goes against the grain of conventional wisdom in viewing it as
a possible positive development. He questions the stereotypical
view of Middle Eastern leaders as "insensitive to human casualties
and destruction." Whether or not the Middle East would be
stable with weapons of mass destruction requires "research
without hoary clichés about irrationality and callousness
of leaders and of people in the Middle East."

In his book Iran andIraq:The Threat from the
North, Anthony Cordesman presents a less-benevolent view of
the Arab and Persian leadership. He writes that in addition to
strengthening the friendly Gulf forces and improving our force
projection capabilities, we must tighten arms controls and limit
technology transfers to Iran and Iraq. Cordesman goes on to state
that these restrictions should not be meant to isolate Iran and
Iraq politically, culturally, or economically. How we can accomplish
both objectives simultaneously is not clearly explained. Cordesman
is also very cautious in his assessment of the Iranian nuclear
effort; while he concludes that Iran will probably need eight
to ten years to have a nuclear capability, he notes that Iran
continues to "allocate significant resources to its nuclear
weapons effort." Marvin Miller, in a chapter on weapons of
mass destruction in the newly released book Powder Keg in the
Middle East,quotes others to arrive at the conclusion
that while Iran has malevolent intentions it lacks the capability
to produce a nuclear weapon. As I read these somewhat dismissive
assessments, I recalled the group of Iranian students I met in
Aleppo, Syria, in 1994: fluent in English, reserved, but polite
and friendly. None were majoring in recreation, social work, or
criminology: they were all engineers.

On the subject of Iran, Ahmed Hashim, in the Adelphi Paper
The Crisis of The Iranian State, sees an Iranian state with
its economy in free-fall, growing popular alienation, and a political
system facing a crisis of legitimacy; the author is not certain
it will survive the crisis. At best he sees an Iran "lurching
from crisis to crisis, hoping to find ad hoc solutions to its
political and socio-economic problems." On the other hand,
Shahram Chubin, in another chapter in Powder Keg in the Middle
East, believes that "Iran has no urgent, overwhelming,
or concrete security problem."

The other pariah state, Iraq, was the subject of a presentation
by an American University graduate student, Ms. Laura Drake, at
a recent seminar. Her analysis, based not only on research but
in-country observation, led her to conclude that the "dual
containment" policy has the earmarks of failure and will
be counterproductive to US interests. It leaves Israel as the
unchallenged hegemon in the area (which is seen as the major objective
of our policy), Syria less likely to come to terms with Israel,
and Iraq in "progressive state breakdown." Iraq has
become the "black hole" of the Middle East and is likely
to draw surrounding states into a conflagration no one wants.
As Drake succinctly put it, the regime of Saddam Hussein is stronger
than the state, and we cannot kill the regime without killing
the nation--an event that would destabilize the entire Middle
East. Moreover, we are increasingly isolating ourselves from the
Europeans, and as Iran undergoes revolutionary ossification, our
Middle Eastern policies could revitalize a movement that is dying
of its own inherent disease.

A common thread through all these readings is the need for not
only strategic intelligence but, much more important, the knowledge
that explains the underlying trends. The mass of information available
to the political-military analyst can be overwhelming unless he
or she has intimate knowledge of and an intuitive feel for the
differences between the significant and the trivial in this field
of study. That sort of knowledge is achievable only after years
of on-the-ground work with the indigenous people. Unfortunately
the terrorist menace has affected the design of our newer embassies
in the Middle East, making it increasingly difficult to come by
that level of knowledge. These embassies have become fortresses,
with layers of security and coded-access elevators and doors.
Communications by e-mail and overly air-conditioned offices seem
more appropriate to corporate vice-presidents than to the occupants
of the slightly disheveled, somewhat decrepit, and highly personalized
working spaces of our embassies in the 1950s and 1960s. Increasingly
our embassies have become little Americas. All too often we know
only what host-nation officials or the Westernized elite who hang
around embassies want us to know. In turn, much of what the local
people know about us is formed by the vacuous Hollywood depiction
of America combined with CNN's daily recitation of disaster and
mayhem, interspersed with "infotainment" of the Simpson
trial variety.

One point is clear. The days of relative stability in the Middle
East are coming to a close. The potentates and despots who rule
the Middle East are aging, and their successors are not designated
or are of doubtful mettle for the job. There are demands for more
democratic and open societies, but many of the Islamist ideologues
in the vanguard of these movements equate the social dissolution
of Western society with its political system. Once in power they
are unlikely to rule in a benevolent fashion. The historical mistrust
between ruler and ruled remains pervasive. The saying attributed
to the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun and quoted by Elie Kedourie perhaps
best sums up the relationship: "The best life has he who
has an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, and
who does not know us and whom we do not know."

The Reviewer: Colonel Norvell B. DeAtkine, USA Ret., is
director of Middle East studies at the John F. Kennedy Special
Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He also
is an adjunct professor of Middle East studies and terrorism at
Methodist College in Fayetteville. A 1959 graduate of the US Military
Academy, he earned a master's degree in Middle East studies at
the American University in Beirut, and is a graduate of the Army
War College.

Strategic Reading on Northeast Asia

DONALD W. BOOSE, JR.

The year 1995--half a century after the end of World War II and
half a decade after the end of the Cold War--was a turbulent one
for Northeast Asia. The region was plagued with disasters. South
Korea's economy continued its strong growth, but its political
life was disrupted. Japan's weak ruling coalition remained in
power, but the Japanese economy suffered severe shocks. Russia
remained too weak, too focused on its domestic concerns, and too
divided in its counsels to take a major role in regional issues,
but gave clear notice of its intention to remain engaged. Midyear
tension between the United States and China had subsided somewhat
by the end of the year, but China's future direction and role
remains a significant concern within the region. In November,
the heads of state of the member nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) forum meeting in Osaka reaffirmed their commitment
to free trade throughout the region by 2020, but opted for an
"Asian" model of self-paced voluntary steps coupled
with regional development assistance instead of the "Western"
model of strict rules and fixed target dates.

The United States tried with varying degrees of success to balance
its priorities among the interests which bind it to the region.
Those interests are identified in current strategy documents as
security, economic prosperity, and a growing community of market
democracies. In February 1995 the US government issued new versions
of three of those documents: the President's National Security
Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff's National Military Strategy, and
the Department of Defense's United States Security Strategy
for the East Asia and Pacific Region. The message in each
of these documents is that the Pacific is equal with Europe as
a region where US interests demand engagement. The Clinton Administration
intends for the United States to continue to be a Pacific power
and, having ended the post-Cold War Pacific drawdown, plans to
maintain the same force presence--about 100,000 troops--in each
region.

The challenge is to develop policy when the three categories of
US interests conflict. While elsewhere in Asia the disconnect
tends to be between economic interests and the US commitment to
democracy and human rights, in Northeast Asia the conflict is
often between security and economic policy. On 27 June 1995 the
perennial US-Japan trade friction was defused once again by an
agreement on automobiles and components. Automobile imports are
also a major point of contention between the United States and
the Republic of Korea (ROK), where reaction against US trade pressures
in this and other sectors--particularly agriculture--prompted
anti-American feelings. US security relationships with both Japan
and Korea were clouded by these trade tensions and by growing
grass-roots dissatisfaction with the American troop presence.
This issue was aggravated in Korea by an incident in a Seoul subway
and brought to a high pitch by the rape of a schoolgirl in Okinawa
by American servicemen, prompting calls in both Japan and Korea
for revision of the respective Status of Forces agreements. Nonetheless,
during 1995 both security relationships were reaffirmed at separate
ministerial-level meetings at which Japan and Korea also pledged
increases in financial support for US forces.

US engagement in East Asia and the interacting interests and foreign
policies of the four major powers in that region are the subjects
of The Strategic Quadrangle: Russia, China, Japan and the United
States in East Asia (1995) edited by Michael Mandelbaum. This
slim but content-rich volume is recommended to readers looking
for a regional overview and well-informed speculation on future
trends. All five contributors are knowledgeable and experienced
observers. Robert Levgold suggests that while Russia will have
little effective influence until its own transformation is complete,
Russian internal upheaval could seriously affect the region.

David M. Lampton argues that China remains fixed on the goal of
continued economic growth, which requires regional stability,
but brings Chinese self-confidence, greater desire for regional
influence, and growing military power. That element of current
US strategy which calls for the enlargement of democracy is viewed
as a threat by the Chinese leadership. Thus, while Lampton argues
for a continued US military presence and engagement in the regional
security dialogue to provide reassurance as China tests its strength,
he warns that foreign policy deftness will be essential if the
United States is to deal with China while maintaining the support
of the other regional powers.

Mike Mochizuki notes that the US-Japan security relationship was
undermined by the end of the Cold War but the Japanese government,
having no satisfactory alternative, will seek to continue the
alliance. He predicts Japan's efforts will be hampered by weak
political leadership and reluctance to shift away from traditional
"neomercantilist" economic policies. Michael Mandelbaum
concludes that the United States will remain actively engaged
in East Asia for two reasons: the risk of a rise to power of a
regional hegemon if the United States withdraws, and the lure
of wealth as the Asia-Pacific region continues its economic boom.
Richard H. Solomon offers a sobering view of the dangers lurking
in the region during this time of transition, but sees the possibility
of future economic and political cooperation among the four powers,
with a strong US-Japan alliance at its core.

The other partner in that alliance, long viewed by American officials
as the linchpin of the US position in Asia, had a troubled year
in 1995. Japan's long recession, the most serious since World
War II, continued into its fifth year as a series of bank failures
and scandals added to the misery. On 17 January an earthquake
struck the city of Kobe, killing some 5000 people and causing
widespread devastation; on 20 March terrorists belonging to the
Aum Shinrikyo religious group attacked the Tokyo subway
system; and in April the yen suddenly rose dramatically against
the US dollar, peaking at an 80:1 yen/dollar ratio, although the
exchange rate later stabilized at about 100:1. These events shook
Japanese self-confidence, while perceptions of a slow and inadequate
government response deepened Japanese disillusionment with politicians
and bureaucrats. Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama proved to be
a skilled survivor, garnering a measure of domestic and international
respect, but his ability to act decisively was hobbled by the
weakness of his coalition government. Murayama resigned early
in 1996 and was replaced on 11 January by former trade minister
Ryutaro Hashimoto.

On security issues, the government announced on 29 November a
new defense policy outline which calls for a reduction in conventional
forces, while increasing Self-Defense Force disaster rescue, anti-terrorism,
and UN peacekeeping operations (PKO) capabilities. Japan's peacekeeping
role was highlighted in January 1996 when a Japanese detachment
joined the UN observer force on the Golan Heights. This was the
fourth such deployment since passage of Japan's 1992 PKO bill.

Five recent books address Japan and its relationship with the
United States, three from an American and two from a Japanese
perspective. The United States, Japan, and Asia: Challenges
for U.S. Policy (1994), edited by Gerald L. Curtis, was originally
prepared as background reading for a 1993 meeting of Columbia
University's Assembly of America. Its contributors, most of them
well-known East Asia specialists in academia, business, and government,
set out to provide information that would be useful to Americans
trying to assess US interests and policy in the region. While
much has happened in the two years since the writing was done,
these essays have held up well. They provide valuable historical
data and perspectives that are still largely valid on a range
of foreign policy, economic, and security issues.

Ambassador Frank McNeil, a Japanese linguist with years of service
in that country as a diplomat and in other capacities and now
Director of the Naval War College Strategic Studies Group, brings
his long personal experience to bear in a useful introduction
for American readers. His Democracy in Japan: The Emerging
Global Concern (1994) is a readable, well-balanced, and easy-to-understand
description of Japanese political and economic developments written
by a man with command of the material and a sensible approach.
McNeil's discussion of contemporary issues and his prologue (which
consists largely of a description of life in a Japanese town written
by his daughter, who teaches English in Japan) can be unhesitatingly
recommended, although his long historical overview is flawed by
excessive errors of the sort resulting from too much cut-and-paste
and too little editing. McNeil's insights and perspective on the
US-Japan relationship are so valuable that it would be nice to
see a subsequent edition of this book with a reworked historical
section.

Thomas M. Huber also has solid credentials as a Japanese linguist
and institutional historian. In Strategic Economy in Japan
(1994), Huber suggests that while much of the Japanese economy
is purely private and commercial, a substantial part--particularly
the techno-industrial and financial sectors--is managed in much
the same way that the United States and other Western countries
manage their foreign and defense policy and for the same reason:
to achieve domestic and international policy goals. He does not
suggest that this is sinister. He points out that Japanese economic
policy is developed by bureaucrats and then subjected to the same
kind of public scrutiny and legislative oversight and approval
as US foreign and defense policy. Indeed, in the absence of a
military force capable of power projection, economic policy seems
a plausible alternative. His comparison of a Japanese export drive
to a military campaign is well done, although some operational
art mavens may take issue with his conflation of the terms "center
of gravity," "decisive point," and "objective."
Whether or not one accepts Huber's arguments, his book provides
a well-written, systematic, and coherent introduction to the Japanese
economy.

In spite of its provocative title, The Hidden Army: The Untold
Story of Japan's Military Forces (1995) is a generally straightforward
account of the development of the Japan Self-Defense Forces since
their inception (at the direction of General MacArthur) as the
National Police Reserve in 1950. The author, Tetsuo Maeda, is
a Japanese journalist who has written on defense issues for years.
He tends to view any increase in Japan's military capability with
suspicion and is critical of Japan's tendency to follow the US
lead in foreign and defense policy, but in tracing the 45-year
history of Japan's postwar military, he provides insights that
Americans will find valuable. Maeda properly deals in detail with
the conundrum of Article Nine of Japan's constitution, which appears
to prohibit categorically any type of armed force, but which has
been variously interpreted over the years. It is clear that when
Japanese officials declare some particular activity "unconstitutional,"
they really mean that it is more than current public opinion will
accept. Some Americans with experience in Japan may believe that
the true meaning is simply, "We don't want to do that right
now."

Daikichi Irokawa's The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern
Japan (1995) provides a thoughtful social history of the Showa
Era (1926-1989). Irokawa lived through those years as a young
adult on the home front in World War II, a sailor in the Imperial
Navy in the last year of the war, and a historian of modern Japan
known for his research on the popular roots of Japanese democracy.
His book--as the title indicates--is focused on the life of Hirohito,
the Showa Emperor, and the role of the emperor in modern Japan.
Some aspects of this issue may be of little interest to non-Japanese
readers, but Irokawa's discussion of the extent of Hirohito's
active involvement in wartime decisionmaking (based on documents
just now coming to light) and his very personal description of
Japan's postwar transformation, including its "lifestyle
revolution," make for compelling reading.

Across the Korea Strait, the nuclear framework agreement between
the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK) continued to hold as we entered 1996. The agreement was
reinforced after an episode of North Korean truculence by two
subsequent agreements signed on 13 June in Kuala Lumpur and on
15 December in New York. North Korea has in effect accepted that
South Korea will manufacture and install the light water reactors
that will replace the North's uncompleted graphite modulated reactors
that produce weapons-grade plutonium. At the same time, the North
continued its efforts to increase direct dialogue with the United
States, attempting to close down the Korean Armistice mechanism
and replace it with a US-DPRK arrangement. Although North Korea
rebuffed efforts to restart the South-North dialogue in 1995,
its representatives met periodically with those of the South in
Beijing. The North also accepted shipments of South Korean emergency
aid rice, inter-Korean trade grew steadily, and the DPRK signed
an unprecedented joint venture agreement with the South Korean
Daewoo Corporation. At year's end, the reclusive life of North
Korea's presumptive leader, Kim Jong Il, and his failure to assume
the titles of President of the DPRK and General Secretary of the
Korean Workers' Party, fueled unprovable speculation about internal
political machinations. A request for emergency food shipments--and
the willingness to accept, grudgingly, South Korean rice--indicated
growing North Korean economic weakness. Nonetheless, the North
Korean military remained formidable.

South Koreans could take pride in their country's economic and
political progress, but events in 1995 raised questions about
the costs, nature, and extent of that progress. The booming economy
suffered serious trade and current account deficits and was plagued
by a high bankruptcy rate among small- and medium-sized firms.
Trials, allegations of payoffs, and attempts at regulation were
manifestations of the troubled relationship between the ROK government
and the giant South Korean conglomerate firms, the chaebol
(reminiscent of and written using the same Chinese characters
as the infamous zaibatsu of prewar Japan). Critics accused
President Kim Young Sam of administrative ineptitude and of using
his otherwise welcome reform campaign to punish political rivals.
Midsummer elections demonstrated Korea's transition to a functioning
democracy, but also revealed the persistence of historic regional
factionalism. Throughout the year protesters called for the arrest
and punishment of those responsible for the bloody 1980 military
suppression of an uprising in the southwestern city of Kwangju.
These trends came to a head when government investigators unearthed
an immense ruling party political slush fund, financed by the
chaebol. The year ended with two former presidents in prison
awaiting trial, widespread demonstrations, and observers asking
if the Republic of Korea will emerge from this experience with
a stronger democracy and healthier government-business relationship,
or revert to the old patterns.

The background to these events is capably described by Mark Clifford,
long-time Korea correspondent and now business editor of the Far
Eastern Economic Review. His Troubled Tiger: Businessmen,
Bureaucrats, and Generals in South Korea (1994) traces the
35-year-old Korean economic miracle initiated by Park Chung Hee,
an austere, autocratic soldier with a vision of Korea's future
and the will to pursue that vision ruthlessly. Calling on his
experiences as an officer in the Japanese army observing state-dominated
economic development in Manchuria, Park crafted a strategy that
took advantage of Korea's protected position within the circle
of US allies, the motivating factor of a very real threat from
the North, and Korea's most valuable resource: a well-educated
Korean workforce willing to endure sacrifice to improve the nation.
Park's "harsh politics and heavy industry" approach,
coupled with tight government-controlled allocation of credit
to selected industries, worked the economic miracle, but established
an insidious pattern of state-industry interdependence. Further,
while Park himself was generally immune to the lure of personal
enrichment, his successors proved unable to resist, and so the
stage was set for more recent events.

Aside from the problems of corruption and political disruption
resulting from the uneasy business-government relationship, Clifford
sees reliance on the 30-year-old economic model as dysfunctional
in the modern global economy. Just as Japan's economy has now
stalled, he predicts the same for Korea if its leadership is unable
to break free of the old patterns. Readers of the Far Eastern
Economic Review will see the ethos of that magazine reflected
in Clifford's book and will not be surprised at his prescription
for dealing with Korea's current problems: deregulation, economic
liberalization, and the opening of Korea to foreign capital flows,
business, and direct investment.

Additional insights and different perspectives are available in
U.S.-Korean Relations (1995), the latest in a useful series
produced by Claremont College's Keck Center for International
and Strategic Studies under the direction of Chae-Jin Lee. Eight
of these excellent and inexpensive little books have been published
to date, four of them dealing with Korea. In this one, Donald
N. Clark examines the cultural stereotypes that have plagued the
relationship and comes to the optimistic conclusion that, while
our views of each other will always be defined by "images,"
knowledge on both sides is improving and the images are becoming
better focused. Wayne Patterson looks at one aspect of the 90-year
US-Korean relationship: Koreans who have immigrated to the United
States. Lawrence B. Krause, whose views on Korean economic reform
seem congruent with those of Mark Clifford, makes a case for industrial
alliances between US and Korean firms. Eun Mee Kim provides a
wealth of hard data on foreign direct investment between the United
States and Korea, noting that the Korean chaebol are now
beginning to invest heavily abroad and are on the verge of becoming
true multinational corporations. Patrick Morgan argues for a "liberalist"
approach, in which cooperative actions and interdependence play
a role as large as or greater than security in the US-ROK relationship.
Even military professionals firmly in the "realist"
camp should find his arguments worth considering. This is a diverse
slate of articles, but it epitomizes the value of the Keck Center
publications: the reader is guaranteed exposure to interesting
and thought-provoking ideas presented by knowledgeable scholars,
packaged in a reader-friendly format.

The prognosis for Northeast Asia is for more turbulence ahead.
Whatever the outcome, the interests of the United States will
be affected. Every one of these books has something to offer that
will help the reader understand the dynamics of the important
Northeast Asian region.

Maeda, Tetsuo. The Hidden Army: The Untold Story of Japan's
Military Forces. Chicago: edition q, 1995.

Mandelbaum, Michael, ed. The Strategic Quadrangle: Russia,
China, Japan, and the United States in East Asia. New York:
Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1995.

US Department of Defense. United States Security Strategy for
the East Asia-Pacific Region. Washington: Department of Defense,
Office of International Security Affairs, February 1995.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff. National Military Strategy. Washington:
Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 1995.

The White House. A National Security Strategy of Engagement
and Enlargement. Washington: GPO, February 1995.

The Reviewer: Colonel Donald W. Boose, Jr. (USA, Ret.)
is the former Director of Asian Studies at the US Army War College.
He spent six years with the United Nations Command Component of
the Military Armistice Commission in Korea and was the Assistant
Chief of Staff/J-5 (Director of Strategic Plans and Policy) of
US Forces, Japan, from 1987 to 1990. He currently teaches at the
Army War College.

Trends in National Security Issues

RUSS GROVES

Readers generally familiar with the stream of recent literature
related to US national security policy and its underpinnings know
that thoughtful and scholarly works are increasingly available
on almost any related topic. As the end of the Cold War may have
opened the gates for nation-states and political movements globally
to stake new claims in pursuit of sovereignty and nationalism,
so also have writers begun a competition of sorts to address subjects
that were often embedded within and overshadowed by larger issues
of the Cold War era. The works in this essay generally fit that
description. Without exception, they are scholarly, thoughtful,
and have merit. Specialists and non-specialists alike who seek
to remain generally abreast of the mainstream can profit from
any of these books.

For those concerned with the diversity of views regarding active
and reserve component force mix and future configurations, The
Future of the Citizen Soldier Force, by Jeffrey Jacobs, is
must reading. The author does a superb job of framing the contemporary
debate, with mention of its historical roots dating to the origins
of the militia. Of particular value are the descriptions of the
National Guard and Army Reserve, their command structures, a section
about adjutants general and their functions, the intended and
actual working relations between active and reserve components,
and recommendations for the future. The author advocates much
broader and more direct control of training and mission readiness
assessment by the active components, as part of force integration
in an environment of declining defense budgets, than is presently
the case.

Although guaranteed to be provocative, this work will serve as
one of the more useful primers on the history, context, and references
bearing upon the larger issues related to the reserve components.
A recent initiative by the active Army to reduce the National
Guard force structure by approximately 60,000 and to reduce in
number or eliminate divisions as an organizational level altogether,
and the spirited opposition by the National Guard, have re-energized
that debate.

The line between advocacy and objectivity in the book is not always
clear. The author at times displays a missionary zeal, focusing
on "flaws" in the present system, which detracts from
otherwise compelling arguments for radical change, including restructuring
of the Guard. A modest scrub of his sometimes pejorative biases
would have left more than sufficient material for serious and
searching debate. While the author offers few final answers to
the issues discussed, he presents well a sense of the processes
through which each generation has tried to deal with them.

The authors of TheAmerican Military in the 21st Century
seek a return to "first principles" in a constructively
hypothetical effort to create the armed forces of the United States
anew. Based on the Key West Agreement of 1948, which resulted
in an assignment of functions to the branches of the military
that, along with embedded rivalries, has endured until today,
the book makes the case for a long overdue look at roles and missions,
organization, efficiency, and means as the bases for change in
the US military establishment.

Using the Key West agreement as a point of departure, Steven Wolfe
is followed by six contributors who provide well-researched opinions
on extraordinarily detailed measures for a wide-ranging reorientation
and reorganization. Berry M. Blechman, positing a future world
moving more toward unification than not, sees economic interdependence,
technology diffusion, and an expanded global audience for all
forms of information due to enhanced communications. To those
conditions he adds emerging shared values, namely through a growth
of democracy and disdain for war and its legitimacy. He recommends
a flexible military, essentially US-based, capable of power projection
under a variety of circumstances, using the present structure
of the Department of Defense, without eliminating branches of
the service as did the Canadians some years ago. He concludes
that a US military should be just that, a military force. He argues
that a lack of national support for a capable and responsive military
will only tempt those whose intent is mischief on a regional if
not international scale.

William J. Durch and Pamela L. Reed review a collection of interests
that will affect the structure of the US armed forces. Included
are public opinion, congressional action, affordability, service
interests, and the interests of other defense-oriented domestic
constituencies. They observe, "Somewhere between doing only
those jobs that a silver bullet can finish and wading deep into
the limitless swamp of ethnic conflict, may be a rationale for
the use of force that will meet the needs of global leadership
while skirting the worst of the swamp."

In a separate article, Durch examines issues related to defense
of the US homeland. He reviews the history of nuclear defensive
forces and their past and present capabilities, including strategic,
tactical, and cruise missiles. Although he sees nuclear weapons
development as virtually ended, he concludes that a progressive
reduction of nuclear missiles should be the goal while maintaining
the ability for assured nuclear retaliation to deter direct nuclear
attack on the United States.

John H. Crenshaw notes that only some peace operations "will
resemble the kinds of missions to which the US military is accustomed
and for which it has traditionally been trained." In his
scheme, soldiers would be specially trained and equipped for peace-making,
peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations. These could be
forces that "do not necessarily shoot to kill, that receive
more training in police techniques and riot control, and, perhaps,
that are trained to exercise greater patience." Crenshaw
urges creation of a new specified peacekeeping command in the
US military, and he recommends maintaining a strong humanitarian
assistance program as an element of military foreign assistance
programs to reduce long-term threats to international stability
and US interests.

While TheAmerican Military in the 21st Century
as a whole does not introduce a brave new world, informed readers
will find themselves attempting to balance the thematic advocacy
of the book with political reality to reach a workable solution.
The book deserves a serious but at-arm's-length reading.

In World Politics and the Evolution of War, author John
J. Weltman reminds readers that over the past five centuries war
has been present three times more often than not. His analysis
begins with the French Revolution, in which governments saw the
potentially unpredictable character of war while the military
saw a new age of the decisive battle, in which warfare had changed
from its former status as a formal, stylized activity to an enterprise
that offered the prospect of achieving clear-cut and dramatic
results. This latter view was legitimized through the writings
of Jomini and Clausewitz.

Weltman describes the development of nuclear strategy as an attempt
at a Jominian solution to a problem that was essentially Clausewitzian
in nature. Rules and calculations surrounding the use of nuclear
weapons abounded, but the real operative factors were attitudes,
expectations, perceptions, and behavior of the antagonists. Nuclear
deterrence is ultimately a speculation about psychology and human
behavior in situations without historical precedent. Arguably,
nuclear deterrence produced a return to conventional war where
nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise, were not factors, as in
Korea and Vietnam (and between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988).
Desert Storm is seen to represent the archetypal form of war that
Americans have historically thought proper.

Weltman asks whether democracies are indeed more peaceful than
other forms of governance. Regardless of the identity of adversaries,
he suggests the United States is in an era of limited, controllable,
and localized warfare in which decisive results and catastrophic
reversals are unlikely. If true, the United States should therefore
adopt a military force posture based on the ability to inflict
punishment cheaply and at a distance, without conquering territory
or destroying opposing armed forces. The goal would be to achieve
limited objectives by punishment, rather than military victory.

Although Weltman's scope is narrow by comparison and perhaps less
intense in its advocacy than War and Anti-War and The
Real World Order, he nonetheless poses a question for the
age: Has large-scale war been tested by modern civilization and
found to be unsatisfactory as a means for solving differences?
His work is balanced, credible, elegant, and deserves attention,
whether or not one agrees with his conclusion.

Prolonged Wars: A Post-Nuclear Challenge, edited by Karl
P. Magyar and Constantine P. Danopoulos, emerges as an unintended
companion work to Weltman's book, although it was published a
year earlier. The editors cite The Art of War by Sun Tzu
to establish the context of their study: "In all history
there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged
warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war
can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it
to a close." Various authors then examine the causes and
outcomes of more than a score of wars since the 1960s.

Their purpose in the book is to develop understanding of the prolongation
of wars, which they propose is as important to national security
as attempts to understand the causes of war: "Understanding
the prolongation phenomenon allows introduction of strategies
for reducing the gravity of such wars by limiting their damage
and by enhancing their prospects for an early peaceful resolution."
This proposition is tested through analyses by various scholars
of recent conflicts: Iran-Iraq, the Lebanese Civil War, the Arab-Israeli
wars, the Sudan, Chad, Liberia, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola and
Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Afghanistan,
and Northern Ireland.

The essay on Vietnam, by Earl Tilford, Jr., has particular relevance.
Tilford reminds readers that while the Vietnam conflict is often
seen by Americans as having begun in 1959, it actually spanned
the years 1945 to 1975. His assessment reveals at least nine reasons
for prolonged involvement by the United States. They are worth
repeating here:

A Cold War US mindset against international communism.

John Kennedy's foreign policy of "pay any price"
to defend liberty.

Covert and incremental introduction of US forces into combat.

Internal disarray in Vietnam's military and its civilian government.

Competing domestic US considerations leading to an ambiguous
and indecisive US policy.

The ill-conceived Rolling Thunder bombing campaign.

An Army and Marine Corps ground war attrition strategy, which
the United States could not win (General Vo Nguyen Giap predicted
it would lead to US withdrawal when US dead reached approximately
50,000).

Success in war measured in logistical terms, absent enemy
cities to be captured or borders to be crossed.

The prolonged agony of US extraction following the battles
of 1968 and Tet in particular.

Tilford adds that lack of coordination between political goals
and military strategy caused the United States to lose; the two
came together only in support of withdrawal. From 1959 until the
war's conclusion, Hanoi was committed to total war. The United
States was committed to something less. It is no surprise that
the twin concepts of "endstate" and "exit strategy"
have become ground rules in the post-Cold War US political-military
discussion.

Tilford and his colleagues have provided the foundation for those
who would convert the lessons of Vietnam and elsewhere into strategic
policy. The conversion, according to summarizing remarks by the
authors, requires an understanding of societal factors that can
make war appear beneficial to some groups; international and regional
factors such as Cold War confrontations that placed surrogates
of the United States and Soviet Union at odds; and strategic incompatibility
between adversaries that can lead to prolongation. Thus counter-prolongation
dynamics were perhaps at work in the 1990-91 Gulf War. Although
not on a scale comparable to Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the
same may have been true of US involvement in Burundi, Rwanda,
and Somalia, while Haiti and Bosnia are headed in the same counter-prolongation
direction. Is "prolonged war" an oxymoron in any foreseeable
US political climate short of total war? Might there be a future
conflict based on a scenario such as environmental or natural
resource availability in which the United States would go to war
for an indeterminate period, intended or unintended?

In the introduction to Gray Area Phenomena, by Max G. Manwaring
et al., Ambassador Edwin G. Corr borrows Peter Lupsha's definition
of the phenomenon: "threats to the stability of nation states
by non-state actors and non-governmental processes and organizations."
This book examines transnational lawlessness in the form of the
drug trade, revolutionary criminal groups, and rogue states, along
with neo-Luddites including eco-terrorists (who oppose the "evils"
of technology), the xenophobes (who prefer racial or national
unity), and fundamentalists (who are the only "true believers").
Strong emphasis is placed on international narcotics control,
especially cocaine revenues, a large part of which is used to
corrupt legitimate government in a variety of ways.

The authors rate the decline of governability in third-world countries
as a major contributor to the existence of the phenomenon. Loss
of governmental legitimacy is attributed in part to efforts by
those governments over time to distribute rather than create wealth.
As a result, losses in societal creativity and free market activity
follow, as well as a general inability to deal with corruption,
poverty, economic opportunities for all citizens, and the conduct
of the state's business, not the least of which is free elections.

In terms of external support to governments under stress, "nation-building,"
despite its attributes, is not seen as a turn-key operation. True
nation-building is the development of people who can and will
fight corruption and inefficiency; who can and will build roads,
schools, and health care facilities; who can and will strengthen
their own national, regional, and local institutions; and who
can and will create and maintain the necessary linkages between
and among institutions within a given society. Also found in this
vexing equation are large urban centers that are impenetrable,
uncontrollable, and form dangerous zones of rebellion. Examples
cited are Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Cairo, and Bombay, in which
the urban mass is such that the cities are, by most measures,
out of control.

On a global scale, the international rule of law and close regulation
of monetary procedures, especially to prevent money-laundering,
are seen as essential antidotes to Gray Area Phenomena.
An international unity of effort is necessary, with priority on
intelligence rather than combat operations. In conjunction with
a political willingness, police efforts must displace military
efforts to restore order and legitimacy.

In this context, the United States must define its own vital-interests
test that will lead to involvement and abstinence on the scale
of gray area activity. In summary, Ambassador Corr argues for
application of the six criteria of the Manwaring paradigm, which
is based on examination of 69 low-intensity conflicts and forms
the basis for coping successfully with insurgencies, terrorism,
and narcotics control. The criteria (to deal mainly with international
narcotics problems) are: maintenance of host government legitimacy;
organization for unity; type and consistency of support to the
besieged government; reduction of outside aid to the traffickers;
and discipline and capabilities of the supported government's
police and armed forces.

Gray Area Phenomena is a serious and worthy look at criminal
and outlaw forces working globally to undermine governments and
market economies. The book proposes many prescriptions for the
challenges listed, but possibly the most instructive comes from
the chapter entitled "Achieving the Elusive Unity of Effort,"
by John T. Fishel. Four case studies from US involvement in Bolivia,
Panama, El Salvador, and Peru provide specifics on the application
of policy with constructive criticism, mainly in the areas of
unity of effort and undefined endstates. It is here that a student
of national strategic and military policy will find the details
that will lend reality to the suggestions found elsewhere in the
book.

This book expands the existing view of operations short of war
and offers increased appreciation for the complexities surrounding
emerging US foreign policy. It is quite possible that gray area
challenges will dominate future efforts by the United States to
protect domestic and international market economies from threats.
Armed interventions may come overwhelmingly to mean operations
against gray area adversaries, rather than more conventional enemies.
Whether or not that comes to pass, Gray Area Phenomena is
an important assessment of real and sinister challenges to US
values. Along with the other works reviewed here, it should be
included in readings intended to lead to a well-rounded comprehension
of life in the national security fast lane.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blechman, Barry M., et al. The American Military in the 21
Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Weltman, John J. World Politics and the Evolution of War.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995.

The Reviewer: Brigadier General Russ Groves is the adjutant
general for Kentucky. He holds a Ph.D., is a member of the Kentucky
Bar Association, and is a licensed architect. He has held five
commands in the Kentucky Army National Guard and is a graduate
of the US Army War College.